Deb- The camping idea really is starting to appeal, especially for sometime this fall when the kids have a day or two off from school. Love the colors & watching the young loons get ready to head south.

Jeff, you will need to check to see which state forest campgrounds remain open after Labor Day. We have never camped past Labor Day, but may this year. The tent is now a thing of the past, for us, we went with a plain Jane "pop-up" . Old folks need to be up off the ground.

Deb- If Nancy has her way, we'll have a pop-up with a shower & a crapper. If I still refuse to grow up it might be a tent, but only with VERY comfortable air mattresses. (Tilt?)

Marty- That was our big bummer for our vacation in Mercer. The blackberries were still green. We did manage to find a few early birds for pancakes & muffins, but the "bumper crop" will be somewhere around next week for that area.

Some of the State Campgrounds do stay open after Labor Day,some just close down parts of it.Fall camping is great,just have to snuggle closer at night! We have a pop up camper and love it! We also like to try Federal campgrounds there is some really neat ones just east of Eagle River,but I'm not sure they are open after Labor Day! Will check this weekend since we are going to one!Council Grounds in Merrill is a nice one to try in the Fall they have showers and some sites have power,then they sometimes have candle light walks,and its close to home.Its neat to watch the packer game outside on a picnic table with the leaves falling around you!

Nell, it's great to see that with all you are going through your wit is still razor sharp.

JKR, I have to disagree on the watching the Packer game thing with the autumn leaves falling all around, TVs while camping, there is no greater camping sin!! The part about fall camping and just snuggling closer, that's good!

Watching the packer game outside on a Sunday with the leaves fallin around us is really neat and not done often with us because we don't normally camp with power but it is a rare treat for us.Since we have never gone to a Packer game so this is kinda the next best thing,we have our own tailgating things too! We would rather not camp with power or showers but once in awhile its kinda fun!I found out that the Federal Campsites over by Eagle River do close after Labor Day. Happy Fall Camping everyone!Hopefully we will have some nice weekends to do it!!

Originally posted by Jeff Boettcher:Due to the red eyes of the two species in question, I can see just how I might have confused you! How ya doing?

I sent you a private message last week Jeff, don't know if you've read it yet. I have an update on my site. I am halfway through radiation and uffda, the fatigue has hit with a vengeance. I can hardly stay awake and it's only 1915 (7:15 p.m. for you non military folks)so I'll be in bed very shortly. Thank God for empty nests

Some of the most beautiful photos in my Tomahawk years album are photos taken from our canoe along the Spirit River. I'll have to scan some when I have more energy.

Nell

More women die of lung cancer than breast cancer. If you smoke, quit. If you don't, don't start.

Originally posted by Marty:...Splitting fire wood and hating it until it's cold out and being glad that I did so! Having the bus nice and toasty warm for the little ones when they crawl on half frozen!! I guess this isn't really for the "Tomahawk's favorite catagory",...

I agree Marty,... when I moved up here & was looking for a place to live, one of the places we looked at had a wood burning stove to augment the furnace. Reminiscent of my younger days living in a log cabin on the continental divide, where you began searching for firewood at first thaw and continued untill the roads into the mountains became impassible. The only reason I didn't take that house was that it was so isolated, which seemed unfair to my 2 teenaged urbanites.

But I personally disagree,... that is a perfect topic for What's Great About Tomahawk!

Originally posted by NurseNell:Some of the most beautiful photos in my Tomahawk years album are photos taken from our canoe along the Spirit River. I'll have to scan some when I have more energy.

And, to NurseNell,.. if you ever do get those photos scanned, I would be happy to post them for you. I am tinkering with a North Woods Web Site that needs just such material,... memories, photos, stories of north woods adventures from the folks that had them.

Baby, it seems that most of us (Tomahawk High grads) did the same thing. In my case it was some 40 years ago. But it did not take me all that long to start to appreciate what a great community Tomahawk was and still is.

I have returned many times and with each visit I learned a new and greater respect and appreciation for Tomahawk.

Tomahawk, like most small communities in this country, face the dilemma of quality of life and preserving it vs growth that provides jobs for their own children as they grow up and enter the work force. It is rather obvious that Tomahawk has decided they have no interest in supplying those jobs. The town is about the same population now as it was those many years ago that I fled to seek employment.

Best of luck to you baby as you embark upon you life’s journey, but no matter where it may lead you, your roots will always be part of you and the older you get the more you realize how much influence your Tomahawk days will always have on you.

I had to leave after graduation but am now considering the possibility of moving back to Tomahawk or somewhere like it some day.

Heck, I moved to a city with nearly 40,000 people and have had a hard time meeting anyone outside of work. I went back to Tomahawk for the weekend and had a discussion with a woman I've never met before about the roads and met two other people from cities near by too. I miss being able to talk to almost anyone, not to mention all the other great things about the area.

The population of the city of Tomahawk is limited by the amount of land to build on. I doubt that you will ever see any great change for that reason. If you check the figures you will find that the outlying areas have been growing rapidly and now that Harley-Davidson has added its new plant they are actually having to go outside the Tomahawk area to hire employees. There are more jobs now than there ever were, in the Tomahawk area.

The National Institutes of Health has just released the results of a $200 million research study completed under a grant to Johns Hopkins.The new study has found that women who carry a little extra weight live longer than the men who mention it.

According to census data, there was only 566 households that earned more then $100k in the entire county in 1999; with a median household income of 39,120. I have no idea how that rates on a national comparison. Tomahawk High puts out what? 100 new grads per year? Counting the rest of the high schools in the county, that’s a lot of competition looking for only a very few high paying jobs.

Just for the record, Harley-Davidson starts out at around $40,000.00 / year.

When I started there in 1970, there were about 60 employees, and the latest count is somewhere around 380.

Quite a change !

The National Institutes of Health has just released the results of a $200 million research study completed under a grant to Johns Hopkins.The new study has found that women who carry a little extra weight live longer than the men who mention it.